Later, outside, Opal watched a woman walk a tightrope that’d been strung from two poles. The performer wore a fur-lined skirt, a half-bodice dress that pushed up her breasts like two loaves of bread. She carried a parasol, and when she dramatically tipped from side to side, on the cusp of a fall, she’d hold the parasol high and right herself.
Across the way, Madame de Fleur emerged from her tent and scanned the crowd until she found what she was searching for. She walked toward Opal.
Up close, Madame de Fleur appeared older than Opal. Creases around her eyes lent her a softness, an Old World knowingness. A curl had escaped her bun and clung to her neck. Opal smelled dampness on her skin, and something cottony and musky and floral at once. Perfume.
“You’ve lost someone,” she said.
“We’ve all lost someone,” Opal said.
“You wear it like a cloak. Your grief.”
“Who then?” Opal challenged. She crossed her arms. How stretched her grief for Oren had become, like the dough she made for braided holiday breads. Her grief had morphed into bread, something she fed upon on special occasions. She waited for the woman to speak.
“Tomorrow,” the woman said. “Sit with me, and I will tell you. Come by, before the show.”
At home, Opal studied herself in the mirror. Her eyes were caves, sunken. Soft lines waved across her forehead. Her skin dulled, even in the light. How different she looked from the woman she imagined herself to be—the woman she used to be. She’d once been described as beautiful. Now, she stared at herself, unblinking, half believing the woman in the mirror might speak. And what would she say? She pulled the pins from her hair, and it fell to her shoulders in a mess that she then brushed and brushed until her arms grew tired.You’ve lost someone, the woman had said.
Oren. It’d been so long since she’d allowed herself to really remember him. Opal had liked how his name required her to make a circle of her lips, as one does when whistling, like Oren had been doing the first time she saw him walking across the Malarkeys’ field. A wooden box rested on his shoulder. He stopped midstride when he spotted her. “Hello, kid,” he said. Something struck Opal as so peculiar about the way he called her kid, as though he were addressing someone else. She looked behind her. “It’s dangerous to look up today,” he said. He hitched his thumb toward the sky. He wasn’t wearing gloves, and his hands were red and cracked from the cold.
Immediately she drew her eyes to the ground. The fields beneath her feet were fallow. The Malarkeys had a daughter just a little older than Opal, and rumor was she’d killed her father’s crops by bleeding too much between the legs, until one day the bleeding stopped and she ran off with a millworker. Opal had been fascinated with the story, with the idea of a life beyond town, and a girl who could leave and never come back.
“I’ll look where I want,” Opal had said.
“Burn your eyes out, unless you have one of these.” He patted his box, and for the first time Opal studied it: a sawed-out circle at the bottom, a square of tin affixed to one end with a hole drilled through it. The inside of the box had been painted white. A solar eclipse, he explained. The moon would align itself between the Earth and the sun, blotting out the light, turning day to night.
“Totality.” He said the word like a line of poetry. “Seven minutes of it.”
“A few minutes doesn’t feel very total to me,” Opal had said.
“When the moon lines up just right—that’s when you can look directly at the sun with your naked eye.” He blushed when he said the wordnaked. He patted his box. “Like staring into the eye of God.”
He demonstrated how he’d put the box over his head, and then use the tin to attract the sun and project the eclipse onto the other end. “But you have to be faced away from the sun. That’s the trick. That’s what most people don’t know—that to observe it, you have to look away from it. But then, if you’re lucky…”
“Totality,” Opal said. Her body warmed.
Opal would later learn that Oren saw dark spots in his vision from staring at the sun through a telescope. The sky held all his dreams. He’d lived up the road at that hospital for a time, until he’d been cured of the seizures that’d plagued him since he was a child. Now he worked as a farmhand. Months later, after they’d been together, on a blanket thrown between a row of cornstalks, his face lit up as he pointed out constellations. He made her stand, naked still, and she thought he was going to explain the sky to her again—there the North Star, the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt—but he didn’t this time. He wrapped the blanket around her shoulders, and they swayed together, dancing.
Standing there in the Malarkeys’ field, she felt breathless from the cold. Woozy. She didn’t know why she removed her hat and let this stranger place the box over her head. The wood scraped her forehead going on, and the weight of it pitched her forward so that Oren had to catch her by the shoulders. They took turns with their heads in that box, studying the sun—the closest star, but not the biggest, he explained. How intimate to put that box over her head and breathe in the air where Oren’s breath still floated. Intoxicating.
THE NEXT EVENING, OPAL FOUNDMadame de Fleur sitting on a cot in the small room behind the stage. She buried her face in herhands when Opal sat across from her, and at first, Opal thought she’d misunderstood the woman’s invitation. She shifted in discomfort, then rose to leave, but at that moment, Madame de Fleur slid a small wooden crate between them. She lit a candle. Opal sat again, and the woman reached for her hands.
The woman’s hands were impossibly soft. Warm. Her long fingers slid through Opal’s own like a puzzle box, now complete.
“It’s like telephoning,” the woman had said.
“I can call someone up?” Opal said, too quickly. She’d revealed her nerves, and, besides, she’d rarely used a telephone, and when she did, it was Jagr’s voice on the other end telling her he’d been called away for work or to the hospital to see a patient who’d taken ill.
“Everything lost returns,” the woman said. “The fundamental rule of our lives.” She spoke softly, her voice nearly a whisper, so Opal had to lean forward, strain to hear.
Opal could not speak, her own voice a solid object lodged inside her throat. She tried to imagine Oren standing in this room. She should leave—what would Jagr say if he found out?—but the woman now gripped her hand tighter, as though she’d overheard Opal’s thought.
Together, the women sat in the darkness. The candlelight bounced off the fabric of the tent; shadows curled and arched. Opal breathed quickly, or maybe she’d forgotten to breathe. She had to keep reminding herself to pull the air through her lungs. Madame de Fleur began to hum, and Opal felt the vibrations where their skin touched.
After a few moments the woman said: “He’s come through.”
“Who?” Opal challenged. Even if she wanted to leave, she feared her legs would not listen. Her body seemed to be revolting. Outside she heard the circus goers gasp, then applaud. The night was only beginning.
“Hello, kid,” the woman said.
